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  When he entered her, she was filled with a sense of humiliation - that her first sex in years should be rape, that a woman of her age could be used by a man this way. Just a short time ago, another man had held her, and it had been a comfort; but it caused only loathing now. She had learned that sex could be a source of deep hatred. At that instant, she hated him as a man just as much as he despised her as a woman.

  While he was doing it to her, she knew that he was living in a dream, an endless nightmare that only he could understand, and that she was just a living prop for his fantasy. For a moment she wondered how one went about escaping from someone else's dream; but then realised the more immediate challenge was just to understand him, to figure out what was coming next. If she couldn't, then she was suffering pointlessly. She needed to know what it was that had happened to him in the past. As he bore down on her, she stared at the void above them - her freedom was just there, beyond his back.

  When he was finished, she called him a pervert, out of utter disgust. But she knew that wasn't right. He wasn't a pervert or a madman; he was a lost soul in desperate search of something, and if he thought he could find it in her, then she might be able to play along with him .. . and go on living.

  -

  She waited impatiently for the sun to make its way into the factory and warm her up a little. The cold was unbearable, painful in a way she never knew it could be. For a while, she had tried to keep moving to warm herself, but now her body was shivering uncontrollably, as if she were having convulsions. But the frigid air in the factory probably wouldn't get any warmer until the sun was high in the sky, and she doubted she would be able to hold out until then. She didn't want to give up, but she'd begun to realise that she would probably freeze to death here.

  To distract her from the spasms that were shaking her body, she gazed around. The shell of the factory was like an enormous coffin. It occurred to her that she had spent nearly every night for the last two years working in a place like this, and she couldn't help thinking that she was destined to die in one, too - that this was the cruel end that was waiting for her on the other side of that door she had been so determined to open. Help me, she whispered to herself. But the help she wanted wasn't from anyone like Kazuo or her husband; it was from Satake, the man who had brought her here.

  She turned to look at him. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor a short distance away. He was watching her trembling body, but not as though he enjoyed seeing her suffer; rather, he seemed to be waiting for something. But what? She studied his face in the half-light. From time to time he glanced up at the windows, as if he were waiting for dawn. He was shaking as well, but he sat naked on the floor, apparently oblivious to the cold.

  -

  He looked up at her, perhaps sensing that she was watching him, and their eyes met in the dim light. He flicked his lighter at her, as if in irritation, then lit a cigarette. Abruptly, she realised that he was waiting for the light, to be able to see whatever he needed to see. And when he found what he was looking for, he would kill her. She closed her eyes.

  A little later, she felt the air stir, and opened her eyes to see Satake standing up and taking something out of his bag. It was a black sheath, presumably holding the knife he was going to use on her. The sight of it made the piercing cold even sharper. She began to shake more violently, but she managed to turn her head away, determined to make Satake think it was only the cold.

  At last the sun came streaming through the windows, and she could feel the tightly closed pores of her skin opening, beginning to breathe again. If she could warm up even a bit, she might be able get some sleep. But then she remembered the knife and laughed at herself. What was the point, with that in store for her?

  Most days she would just be getting home from the factory now, ready to put breakfast on the table and get a load of laundry started. Then, when the sun got to a certain point in the sky, she wouldn't be able to put off sleep any longer. What would Yoshiki and Nobuki think if she disappeared without a trace? It didn't matter whether she died here or somehow managed to escape, she was already beyond their reach. Hadn't Yoshiki admitted that he wouldn't come looking for her? There was something about this thought she found almost comforting, that made her realise how far she had already come.

  When it was light enough, Satake came over to stand by her. 'Did you make all those lunches on something like this?' he said, apparently amused at his little joke. She lay on the rack, like a meal about to be rolled down the line, and tried not to show her fear. He was right: who would ever have thought she'd end up on the belt herself? Yoshie, who controlled the speed of the line, had found a way out; but not her. 'How do you cut up a body?' he asked, running a delicate finger across her neck and then down from her throat to her crotch, as though he were dissecting her. She cried out at the pain of it on her already raw skin. 'How did you come up with the idea of chopping him up? What did it feel like when you were doing it?' She realised that he was trying to whip up her hate for him. 'You're just like me,' he said. 'You've gone too far to go back.'

  Again, he was right: there was no way back. She had heard the doors slamming behind her one by one. The first had closed the day they had cut up Kenji. But what had happened to Satake to make him feel this way? She asked him, but he didn't answer. She stared into his eyes - at the swamp concealed in there - or was it just a void?

  She screamed as he suddenly forced his cold finger between her legs. But when he entered her for the second time, her body was surprised by his warmth. It seemed to rejoice at a source of heat so much more potent than the pale sunlight. The warm, hard thing inside her began to thaw her from the belly out. This link between them was the warmest object in that empty cavern; but it troubled her that her body could almost innocently take pleasure in it, and she was determined not to let Satake know it had accepted him. She closed her eyes again, and he seemed to believe she was rejecting him.

  'Open your eyes,' he said, pressing his thumbs into them. Let him blind me, she thought, if it would keep him from finding out that I responded to him. She hated him with her whole being, and it horrified her to think that her eyes wouldn't show him that fact if he looked in them now. He told her he hated her because she was a woman. Then why didn't he stop forcing himself on her and just finish her off? He slapped her again to stir up her hatred, but somehow she found herself pitying a man who needed to be despised in order to feel pleasure. His past was beginning to take shape out of the fog.

  'There's something wrong with you,' she told him, 'something broken inside.'

  'Of course there is,' he said. 'Just like there's something broken in you. I knew it the first time I saw you.' For her, knowing it was the damaged part of her that had first drawn him to her only made her hate the man moving inside her all the more. He pressed his lips to hers, and she realised how desperately he wanted her. Then he reached over for the knife, shook it free from the sheath, and put it by her head. Her eyes closed instinctively from fear of the cold blade next to her, but Satake forced them open and peered at her. She stared back at him, knowing that given the chance she'd use the blade on him as readily as he'd penetrated her.

  The factory was awash in sunlight now, but there was another kind of light shining in his eyes, the first sign that she was becoming real to him, that she moved him. But it wasn't a feeling that would ever grow or mature. Just as she had once thought she wouldn't mind dying by his hand, he was longing for the same end himself. Suddenly, she realised she understood him.

  She felt the dream in which he'd been trapped begin to dissolve, felt him move closer to the living world. Their bodies came together and their eyes met. Seeing nothing reflected there but her own image, she felt a wave of pure pleasure rise and break over her. She could die like this. But the glint of the blade in the corner of her eye pulled her back to earth.

  -

  He beat her until she lost consciousness, but a nauseating pain in her jaw revived her a short time later. He was staring at her, enraged.